Margaret Kalfas was upbeat and charming as she described the winter Saturday when she had a stroke at the wheel of her car.

She had stopped in traffic and remembered her confusion when police officers approached her, and more confusion when she tried to drive off and saw one of the officers dangling her keys outside the driver's side window.

"I thought 'What are you doing with my keys?'" the Whitehall Township woman said. "I was hesitating — I wanted to drive away. I thought 'What's wrong with me?'

On Friday, Kalfas, 83, got to meet and thank the Whitehall police officers, Cetronia Ambulance team and Lehigh Valley Hospital doctors and nurses who saved her life Feb. 7, when a piece of a clot in her carotid artery broke off and traveled to her brain as she drove on MacArthur Road.

The reunion at the hospital's main campus in Salisbury Township was arranged to call attention to May as Stroke Awareness Month and to Lehigh Valley's status as the region's only Comprehensive Stroke Center.

Darryn Shaff, the hospital's chief of neurointerventional radiology, used visual aids, including X-rays of Kalfas' arteries and brain, to show how he threaded a catheter through her groin to her carotid and used it to vacuum out the three-inch clot.

Shaff used a filter to make sure no more of the clot reached Kalfas' brain, where the fragment that caused the stroke dissolved.

By the next morning, Kalfas was awake and alert and just a few weeks away from a full recovery.

Sitting beside his wife of 62 years at Friday's event, John Kalfas choked up as he thanked the first responders and medical teams. Margaret had been on her way to pick him up from a dialysis center when she had the stroke.

"A million thanks to the doctors for giving me my wife back," he said.

Barnes, the police officer who took Kalfas' keys and kept her from pulling back into traffic, said he was at Kohl's in the Whitehall Mall when someone told him about an erratic driver.

Kalfas "was conscious but catatonic" when he approached her, he said. "She kept trying to put [the car] in gear."

At the emergency room, doctors recognized the severity of the emergency.

"This was not a subtle stroke," said neurologist Lorraine Spikol. "It was clear we would have to act quickly or it would kill a major part of the brain."

A person suffering a stroke loses about 2 million brain cells a minute, said Shaff, who had been waiting on line at his favorite Asian grocery store when he was paged about the emergency.

Shaff had a good idea of what to expect as he drove to LVH, because he had been filled in on what MRI imagery showed.

From traffic stop to surgery took less than 90 minutes. Hospital officials said two factors were crucial to Kalfas' survival and rapid recovery: The police officers and ambulance crew quickly recognizing stroke symptoms and the hospital's ability to prepare for her arrival based on that information.

"Everyone was there at the right time," Shaff said. "Whether a patient is going to do well doesn't necessarily depend on the procedure but on how quickly it starts."

Lehigh Valley Hospital has the second-highest volume of such procedures in the Mid-Atlantic region, Shaff said, adding that evidence shows mechanical extraction appears to be more effective than clot-busting drugs, which have long been the standard treatment.

Stroke symptoms can be remembered with the acronym FAST: Facial drooping, Arm weakness and Speech difficulty. The T stands for time, meaning help should be summoned right away for anyone exhibiting the symptoms.